Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday May 23, 2010 @10:10AM
from the showcase-showdown dept.

Degrees writes "Although Novell rejected the bid from Elliott Associates earlier this year, reports now indicate Novell has decided to embrace the inevitable. According to the Wall Street Journal (sub. required): 'As many as 20 companies have expressed interest in Novell, according to people familiar with the matter. Most, if not all, of the companies expected to lodge serious bids are private equity firms. ... Novell has four separate businesses, each of which could be attractive to a rival technology company. However, it's unlikely that a tech company would bid for all of Novell, these people said. Private equity firms, however, could break up Novell and either sell off the pieces or run them as standalone businesses.' Are there any companies that don't have an enterprise grade Linux distribution, and ought to? Ditto workstation management, directory services, legacy email, and virtualization suite?"

Bruce Perens had a petition running for a while that listed thousands of disgusted and angry linux advocates when novell signed the microsoft pact (see http://www.techp.org/ [techp.org] - note: offline at the moment).

As far as I'm concerned, Novell stabbed the community in the back. I don't use Novell products and neither should you.

Mono? Yes. They bought Ximian, and are also responsible for a lot of GNOME work. They are the second-largest contributor to OpenOffice.org, behind Sun. They've contributed to GNOME, to the Linux kernel, to Xen, and a number of other projects. But, because they signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft they are evil and hate the community. Apparently.